David McCallum,
Barney’s son,
remembers the birth
of the game from
a much younger
perspective.
“As a 10-year-old at
the time, nobody was
being that diligent
about taking down
the history of how
things happened,”
he said. “I was one of
those kids who was
always fascinated
by the adults. I paid
attention to what was going on with them,
with the kids down on the beach, and what
was going on with this game. The adults, they
took to it right away. The parents invented it.
It was a bunch of 40-year-olds dinking around
with this thing and it was curious to me that
they were all playing this new game and liking
it.”
The younger McCallum recalls that, in its
infancy, it appeared that pickleball might be
the solitary highlight of a bygone summer—a
game that came and went only to be
remembered with a smile.
“I don’t think anybody intentionally took
it off the island after the summer ended,”
he said. “It was a neat activity to keep adults
busy. That first year, there wasn’t much
activity regarding pickleball off the island.
I can remember my dad working on paddle
designs a few times,
but that was it.”
The following
summer, however, the
courts were swept off,
the nets put back up
and the paddles came
back out, McCallum
said.
“I’m not sure
anyone thought that
it would happen,” he
remembers. “That
second year was when
it started to move
off the island. People
realized that this was fun and great recreation
and exercise.”
Next, a nearby family on the island built
a court and used it to entertain a lot of their
guests. The circle grew, and local gyms in the
Seattle region started picking it up as well.
“I was an envelope manufacturer,” Barney
McCallum said. “But I took it on myself to
supply people with the things they needed
to play. People called me for balls or paddles.
They referred me to friends. There was no
vision that this thing would grow into what
it is today. If we thought this would be huge
back then, people would